Mapping the brain is wave of the future

President Barack Obama leaves the stage in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, April 2, 2013, after he spoke about the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative.
AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

President Barack Obama leaves the stage in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, April 2, 2013, after he spoke about the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday launched an unprecedented effort to map the inner workings of the brain with the help of dozens of scientists and engineers from San Diego, a world leader in the study of how people think, learn and behave.

The BRAIN initiative will cost upwards of $1 billion over a decade, much of which will be spent on inventing sensors and imagers that will give scientists their first look at how huge numbers of neurons communicate and collaborate. The technological leap is needed to understand how the brain functions when it is healthy and what goes wrong when things like autism, epilesy and Alzheimer’s disease arise.

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At least $28 million in private money will come from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, which will tackle the challenge with its long-time partner, the University of California San Diego.

The project will require new ways to process and distribute extraordinary amounts of data, an advance that will be made possible by innovations likely to come from such places as Qualcomm, the San Diego telecommunications giant that specializes in chips and high-speed wireless computing. The goal: Enable scientists to simultaneously record the activity of about 1 million neurons. Today, they can only "see" about 200.

Experts say the initiative -- formally known as the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or BRAIN, --will likely send tens of millions of dollars in grants to “the Mesa,” the collection of research centers along North Torrey Pines Road in La Jolla. The Mesa is home to the University of California San Diego, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and other centers that support one of the largest groups of neuroscientists and nanoengineers in the country.

“The new mapping tools will transform our understanding of the brain in the way that the Human Genome Project revealed the nature of DNA,” said Terry Sejnowski, a Salk neuroscientist who helped shape the initiative, and who will serve on a federal committee to outline the plan's future. He attended the White House announcement on BRAIN, appearing with UC San Diego's Ralph Greenspan, one of the project's original six architects.

The BRAIN project represents an unusual partnership between government and the private sector. It will begin in 2014 with $110 million in seed money from the federal government. Additional funding is expecting in the following years. The Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle says it will spend more than $60 million a year, for an undetermined period, to support the initative. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute will spend $30 million a year, also for for an undetermined period, on Brain projects.

The California-based Kavli Foundation will increase the endowment of its joint brain institute at the Salk and UCSD by $4 million, provided that the two science centers raise $8 million in matching funds.

UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla, who attended Tuesday's White House announcement, said, "Raising money is always difficult. But this has been a long time in coming and it is absolutely will chart the next frontier in science."

The long-term funding “is going to ramp up over time,” said Sejnowski, who spoke with President Obama about the plan on Tuesday. “The rocket has launched. This is going to have a galvanizing effect on all of science, not just the neurosciences.”

Analyzing the electrical and chemical activity of the brain has proven to be one of the most difficult problems in science. Such tools as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) provide a generalized look at what’s going on in areas of the brain. And scientists can record signals from small numbers of individual cells. But they’ve yet to develop the sensors that would allow them to figure out the circuitry of the brain, which has about 100 billion neurons. The problem has limited scientists' ability to explore basic things, like how humans reason and how they can instantaneously recall images they haven't thought of for years.

“We need new ways to detect activities that are going on outside of our view and which cover vast areas of the brain, which is a big challenge,” said Greenspan, associate director of UCSD's Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind. "If we could do that, we could detect and diagnose disease earlier."

Geneticists faced a similar problem until the $3.8 billion Human Genome Project produced fast and comparatively inexpensive new machines to sequence people's DNA.

BAM dates to September 2011, when some of the most eminent neuroscientists in the world met outside London to talk about how to improve the study of the brain. They were brought together by the Oxnard-based Kavli Foundation, which has created eight major nanoscience centers, including the one at UC San Diego. Toward the end of the meeting, Greenspan and five other scholars peeled off for some mental spitballing.

Greenspan remembers Harvard's George Church, who helped shape the Human Genome Project, saying, "I have heard anyone say what they really want to do, even if we don't know how to do it." Columbia University's Rafael Yuste piped up: "I want to be able to record every cell in the brain at one time."

That lit a fire. The group issued a white paper outlining BAM, stirring excitement among neuroscientists. The Salk's Sejnowski was brought in to help flesh out the idea, even though there was no indication that it would ever be funded. Four months ago, Sejnowski organized a meeting at Caltech in which he asked engineers from such places as Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm some daunting questions.

"No one had taken a serious look at how much data you're going to collect, how you're going to analyze it, where it's going to be kept and who is going to have access to it," Sejnowski says.

It was determined that -- with new and better sensors and computer programs -- researchers could glean about the amount of data generated each year by the Large Hadron Collider, Europe's high-energy particle accelerator.

"Google told me, 'This is doable,' '' Sejnowski says.

Then came the thunder. During his State-of-the-Union address on Feb. 12, President Barack Obama unexpectedly hinted that he would propose a landmark project to map activity in the brain. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, followed by posting a message of Twitter noting that Obama had mentioned the Brain Activity Map. It caused a sensation on the Mesa -- one that has been tempered by the scope of the project.

"There's no question that this is going to be a difficult enterprise and a big challenge," said Nick Spitzer, director of UC San Diego's Kavli Institute. "That's why President Obama is characterizing it as one of a series of Grand Challenges. But the good news is that nanoengineers, electrical engineers, computer engineers and others say that they are poised to be able to develop the necessary instrumentation."

Jeff Elman, a cognitive scientist at UC San Diego, said, "Five or ten years ago, the idea of comprehensively mapping human brain activity would have been fanciful. The technology would have seemed like science fiction. Today, the technology and goal seems to be within our grasp."

BAM also could be a financial boon for San Diego County.

"I expect this project to lead to significant local investment in science and entrepreneurial companies, similar to what the Human Genome Project did here a decade ago," said Duane Roth, chief executive officer of CONNECT, which promotes technology and the life sciences in the San Diego area.

He pointed to the rise locally of the J. Craig Venter Institute, Life Technologies, and the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine.

"These projects have not only created thousands of new jobs, but more importantly, changed the face of medicine for all of us so that we now have hope for better outcomes from disease. The Brain Activity Map offers the same opportunity. "